Seqwright has donated their time and materials to help characterize the new AAV2 reference material. The company will sequence the Adeno-Associated Virus, serotype 2 (AAV-2) vector and the associated plasmid. Seqwright also donated their services to sequence the adenoviral reference material Ad5.

Florida Biologix is donating its services to perform long-term stability testing on the Adenoviral, serotype 5 Reference Material which has been in use since 2002. After over seven years in storage at ATCC, the vector remains stabile as measured with total virus particles and infectious titer assays.

Both reference materials are intended for use in validating internal reference standards and assays. They were produced under the guidance of formal working groups which included non-voting FDA members. The production process and all testing have been well documented on the BioProcessing Journal website. For even more information and to purchase these materials, please visit the ATCC website.

Our best wishes to you for a prosperous 2010. And here’s my prescription for better financial times:

First, we need banks to return to either commercial or investment banking, since mixing the two has been a disaster for everyone except bank executives.  We need commercial banks to concentrate on their communities and make the loans that will help small businesses take risks, and especially retain, hire, and train the people they will need as the economy improves.  Interest rates are incredibly low, and it’s my guess that there will be even more government absorption of risk through the Small Business Administration, and other programs. 

But of course, we need the government to be fairly consistent in how it stimulates and regulates our banks.  It can’t expect ever higher capital levels and lower risk taking while demanding that the banks make more loans.  A balance for these expectations must be established quickly.

And then we have the investment banks, which all but stopped initial public offerings (IPOs) to gamble on exotic instruments and the latest bubbles.  Without IPOs, the only real way for investors and founders to cash out was to sell the company.  And the past decade has proven to me that mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have done little more than pay big returns to top company management and law firms.  Everyone else has come up short.

The commercial and investment banking functions have become far too entangled, and the result has been the mass disenfranchisement of small business borrowers and investors alike.  And to make things worse, we let the banks get into insurance where they became even more distracted by insuring crazy investments they never should have created. 

So I suggest we all keep pushing for government-backed loan programs like SBA, which helped develop the small-business-based economies that created so much innovation and so many jobs, and support regulation that restores investment banking functions which will give investors more options.